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Authors: Troy Blacklaws
Tags: General Fiction
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woman hawks sunflowers from under a faded beach umbrella.
A boy flutters his hands as if swimming in the liquid mirage. His hands draw their eyes to his windmills crafted from wire, cans and dead time.
Jabulani recalls his boyhood of fishing in the river and killing birds and lizards and sucking udder-hot milk out of his hands and learning the art of stick fighting. He recalls walking for miles down a dust track to a tar road where he hawked giraffes he’d carved from mukwa to tourists from South Africa. South African money put him through high school in the town at the end of the tar road. And when the manila envelope came from the university, his father went out and killed that lazy, lagging old ox. And then there was whistling teeth and the music of the mbira and ululating tongues and jouncing bones and sour beer.
Now Nina halts to buy a pineapple from an old woman who knifes off the spiky skin for them.
They ride on again, sucking at the yellow pulp and tuning into the wry, haunting twanging of Ry Cooder’s guitar.
– It’s a mystery. This isn’t pineapple country. Only thing yellow you tend to find here is sunflowers, or the yellow sign of a Shell garage. Just the other day I heard a hadeda ibis calling in my yard in Cape Town. It’s as if the compass in their head’s fucked. There didn’t used to be hadedas so far south.
She lifts the hem of her shirt to mop juice from her chin. Her low-slung jeans let out a rumour of hair.
His cock unfurls as he gazes out the window at the flat, stark land where opal-toned bones blink in the sun and lone birds ride the wires.
His forehead drums against the window as she swings the Pajero off the tar.
He winds down the window to gasp for air.
She kills Cooder.
For a moment the world’s violently still. Then he hears the wind hum along the telegraph wires. And then he hears her husky breath in his ear.
She slides his pineapple-sticky hand under her panties. She’s humid after the coolness of the pineapple.
He’s perky as a meerkat now.
She unzips him and slides her lips over him. A bus blares its horn at them. The Pajero shudders in the gusty wake of the bus.
She licks her lips and pops another half-moon of pineapple into her mouth.
Then the Pajero’s gunning south again.
He smells her on his fingers.
She’s humming along to an Eels song.
He flicks through the sun-warped novel by Coetzee she has bird-winged on the dash. Yet Thokozile’s eyes come between him and the out-of-focus words on the paper. He flicks to the cover and studies the image of a raw-boned fugitive dog on a dirt road. I am that lost dog , he thinks.
17
H ERMANUS. NOON.
I stand before the house of the glass-eyed priest Zero said would hand his Vespa over to me. The sign on the gate tells me to BEWARE OF THE DOG . I can hear Chopin played poorly on the piano. I call hello . A butcherbird flies from the gutter.
No hiatus in the playing. And no sign of the dog. A rusty hand mower is islanded in long grass. An old black bicycle with a basket up front leans against the wall.
The gate whines like an old man’s bones. I go along crazy paving through the high grass to the door. There’s a pane of opaque glass in the door. I ring the doorbell. The piano fades out. A warped shadow ghosts towards me.
The priest in a frayed dog collar and long, colonial khaki shorts. I can’t tell which eye is glass.
– I’m Jerusalem. I’ve come for the Vespa. My old man called you up from Cape Town.
– Aha. Cupido? The Vespa’s in the garage.
– Where’s your dog?
– Out in the backyard. He’s old and stone deaf. He used to love Chopin. Now he can’t tell Mozart from Masekela.
We go round to the back of the house. The priest has a faintly fascist way of throwing his feet out ahead of him.
On seeing a stranger, the dog jerks to his feet and barks a frenzied, gut-swinging, ball-jiggling volley. The priest puts out his hand to calm his old yellow lab.
– Don’t mind him. It’s just an
A boy flutters his hands as if swimming in the liquid mirage. His hands draw their eyes to his windmills crafted from wire, cans and dead time.
Jabulani recalls his boyhood of fishing in the river and killing birds and lizards and sucking udder-hot milk out of his hands and learning the art of stick fighting. He recalls walking for miles down a dust track to a tar road where he hawked giraffes he’d carved from mukwa to tourists from South Africa. South African money put him through high school in the town at the end of the tar road. And when the manila envelope came from the university, his father went out and killed that lazy, lagging old ox. And then there was whistling teeth and the music of the mbira and ululating tongues and jouncing bones and sour beer.
Now Nina halts to buy a pineapple from an old woman who knifes off the spiky skin for them.
They ride on again, sucking at the yellow pulp and tuning into the wry, haunting twanging of Ry Cooder’s guitar.
– It’s a mystery. This isn’t pineapple country. Only thing yellow you tend to find here is sunflowers, or the yellow sign of a Shell garage. Just the other day I heard a hadeda ibis calling in my yard in Cape Town. It’s as if the compass in their head’s fucked. There didn’t used to be hadedas so far south.
She lifts the hem of her shirt to mop juice from her chin. Her low-slung jeans let out a rumour of hair.
His cock unfurls as he gazes out the window at the flat, stark land where opal-toned bones blink in the sun and lone birds ride the wires.
His forehead drums against the window as she swings the Pajero off the tar.
He winds down the window to gasp for air.
She kills Cooder.
For a moment the world’s violently still. Then he hears the wind hum along the telegraph wires. And then he hears her husky breath in his ear.
She slides his pineapple-sticky hand under her panties. She’s humid after the coolness of the pineapple.
He’s perky as a meerkat now.
She unzips him and slides her lips over him. A bus blares its horn at them. The Pajero shudders in the gusty wake of the bus.
She licks her lips and pops another half-moon of pineapple into her mouth.
Then the Pajero’s gunning south again.
He smells her on his fingers.
She’s humming along to an Eels song.
He flicks through the sun-warped novel by Coetzee she has bird-winged on the dash. Yet Thokozile’s eyes come between him and the out-of-focus words on the paper. He flicks to the cover and studies the image of a raw-boned fugitive dog on a dirt road. I am that lost dog , he thinks.
17
H ERMANUS. NOON.
I stand before the house of the glass-eyed priest Zero said would hand his Vespa over to me. The sign on the gate tells me to BEWARE OF THE DOG . I can hear Chopin played poorly on the piano. I call hello . A butcherbird flies from the gutter.
No hiatus in the playing. And no sign of the dog. A rusty hand mower is islanded in long grass. An old black bicycle with a basket up front leans against the wall.
The gate whines like an old man’s bones. I go along crazy paving through the high grass to the door. There’s a pane of opaque glass in the door. I ring the doorbell. The piano fades out. A warped shadow ghosts towards me.
The priest in a frayed dog collar and long, colonial khaki shorts. I can’t tell which eye is glass.
– I’m Jerusalem. I’ve come for the Vespa. My old man called you up from Cape Town.
– Aha. Cupido? The Vespa’s in the garage.
– Where’s your dog?
– Out in the backyard. He’s old and stone deaf. He used to love Chopin. Now he can’t tell Mozart from Masekela.
We go round to the back of the house. The priest has a faintly fascist way of throwing his feet out ahead of him.
On seeing a stranger, the dog jerks to his feet and barks a frenzied, gut-swinging, ball-jiggling volley. The priest puts out his hand to calm his old yellow lab.
– Don’t mind him. It’s just an
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